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Thursday, March 4, 2010

The Princess and the Bear

It's taken me a while to get to this one. I'd had it on hold at the library for forever, and so of course it would finally come in just a week before I was scheduled to have a baby, which also happened to be right smack in the middle of Cybils month. Anyway. I had to let the hold expire and then re-request it. So now I've finally read it. And ... I liked it. I did. I did have some issues with it, though.

The storyline, the concept of it, is really neat. The hound and the bear must come to trust each other and discover their own magic, along with the true nature of their deepest selves, all while fighting against the Unmagic that threatens their pasts and the future. But I didn't feel like the concept got carried off as well as it could have. Some of the transitions left much to be desired. I just felt a little whiplashed at times. I won't give specifics for fear of spoiling the plot. The first half of the book feels really slow. I spent most of it wondering, well who's the "princess" half of the title? She never showed up. To alleviate any similar confusion you might experience, if any of you should choose to read this book, the hound is the "princess." She's not really a princess, but I guess in the previous book she had a brief stint as a human princess, so to keep the titles parallel (The Princess and the Hound, The Princess and the Bear), the author decided to call her one. In the title. I know, confusing. And then the second half of the book flies, sometimes too quickly (hence the whiplash).

All in all, though, it was a neat story. I left it wishing the first part had been condensed and the second part fleshed out, however. That's my take.